On account of its undoubted signs of Roman occupation in the form of two rectangular camps, and its situation at the meeting-place of some three or four Roman roads, New Malton has been made one of the competitors for the honour of having been the Derventio of the Antonine Itinerary. It is, however, far more probable that Stamford Bridge, further down the Derwent, bore that name.
Old Malton is a cheerful and well-kept village, with antique cottages here and there, roofed with mossy thatch. It makes a pretty picture as you come along the level road from Pickering, with a group of trees on the left and the tower of the Priory Church appearing sedately above the humble roofs. A Gilbertine monastery was founded here about the middle of the twelfth century, during the lifetime of St. Gilbert of Sempringham in Lincolnshire, who during the last year of his long life sent a letter to the Canons of Malton, addressing them affectionately as ‘My dear sons.’ His death took place at Sempringham when he was over a hundred years old, and his burial in the priory church there was witnessed by a great multitude, as well as the grief-stricken priors and abbots of his own and other orders. Very little remains of Malton Priory with the exception of the church, built at the very beginning of the Early English period. Of the two western towers, the southern one only survives, and both aisles, two bays of the nave, and everything else to the east has gone. The abbreviated nave now serves as a parish church.
Between Malton and the Vale of York there lies that stretch of hilly country we saw from the edge of the Wolds, for some time past known as the Howardian Hills, from Castle Howard which stands in their midst. The many interests that this singularly remote neighbourhood contains can be realized by making such a peregrination as we made through the Wolds.
There is no need to avoid the main road south of Malton. It has a park-like appearance, with its large trees and well-kept grass on each side, and the glimpses of the wooded valley of the Derwent on the left are most beautiful. On the right we look across the nearer grass-lands into the great park of Castle Howard, and catch glimpses between the distant masses of trees of Lord Carlisle’s stately home. The old castle of the Howards having been burnt down, Vanburgh, the greatest architect of early Georgian times, designed the enormous buildings now standing. In 1772 Horace Walpole compressed the glories of the place into a few sentences. ’... I can say with exact truth,’ he writes to George Selwyn, ‘that I never was so agreeably astonished in my days as with the first vision of the whole place. I had heard of Vanburgh, and how Sir Thomas Robinson and he stood spitting and swearing at one another; nay, I had heard of glorious woods, and Lord Strafford alone had told me that I should see one of the finest places in Yorkshire; but nobody ... had informed me that I should at one view see a palace, a town, a fortified city, temples on high places, woods worthy of being each a metropolis of the Druids, vales connected to hills by other woods, the noblest lawn in the world fenced by half the horizon, and a mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive; in short, I have seen gigantic places before, but never a sublime one.’
The style is that of the Corinthian renaissance, and Walpole’s description applies as much to-day as when he wrote. The pictures include some of the masterpieces of Reynolds, Lely, Vandyck, Rubens, Tintoretto, Canaletto, Giovanni Bellini, Domenichino and Annibale Caracci.
KIRKHAM ABBEY
The gateway is the chief relic of this once beautiful Cistercian abbey. On the right and through the archway the Derwent can be seen flowing beneath hanging woods.